Adam had a play around with the Arcane Worlds alpha at the beginning of the year. He liked it, even if was just a demonstration of world generation, choppy waters, and glowy sun graphics. Those are the building blocks of many games, anyway. If games are anything like babies, then 10-and-a-bit months is plenty of time for it to have gestated. I wonder what sex it is? Does it have hair? My Arcane Worlds, how you’ve grown>. (more…)

Would David Fincher’s Se7en be any better if the revelation at the end was that the box contained a pile of indie games for almost no money at all? It would certainly be less psychologically damaging to Brad Pitt to discover the Lovecraft inspired platformer Eversion in there instead of (a box of fluffy kittens for sale – spoiler ed). And while he lived happily ever after he could think back to that lovely day when he and Morgan Freeman and Kevin Spacey all hung out in a dusty field playing indie games. That’s the power of cheap indie games, people: they make you forget someone killed loads of people in really horrible ways. (more…)

On the seventh day of the month of Horace we are obliged to remember that some people are still at a lower level than we are, and haven’t defeated all the bosses that we have. It’s important to keep such things in mind as we cast our eyes upon the gilded shores that lie beyond the seventh window of the advent calendar. What could it be? (more…)

Dear Mr Ardmaann Animation. I Notice you have not sent ananswer to my message yet. If you dont answer soon I will send my idea to Pixar and they will make “Charlie Chirp: The Story Of A Sparrow Who Wants To Join The famous Silver Swifts Aerobatic Display Team.” DO YOU WANT THIS TO HAPPEN? If its because you think the bit where Charlie gets bullied by the blackbirds is raceist I will change that. It would be just as good if he was bullied by magpies or special moths. If its because you do not like the end when Charlie gets sucked into the Airbus A320 engine NO PROBLEM!! He could get sucked into a Boeing 787 Dreamliner engine. Actually this could be better! Your good fiend Tim Stone.>

Final Fantasy XIV caught me right at the tail end of my MMO junkie phase. I’d put a fairly significant amount of time into Final Fantasy XI before it, so I figured why not? And honestly, I have to give Final Fantasy XIV some credit: it replied to that question very, very quickly>. It was as though Square had developed the thing inside a bubble. Reinforced by steel plate. On the surface of the moon. The number of incredibly bizarre, even-more-incredibly unintuitive design decisions was absolutely baffling. A brilliantly flexible class system gelled up its giant anime hair, picked up a slightly smaller blade, and attempted to save the day, but its quest was disastrously unsuccessful. Fortunately, Square decided to scrap the whole thing and start over from scratch. But what’ll the realm look like once it’s finally been reborn? Well, pretty familiar, if a new trailer’s anything to go on. But maybe not for the reason you think.

Dodging the incredibly strange trend in which games with portentous names become self-fulfilling prophecies (Hello, Duke Nukem Forever>), End of Nations has not, in fact, met its untimely end. You could be forgiven for thinking that it’s in pretty big trouble, though. Indefinite postponements and worrisomely far-reaching developer layoffs tend to have that effect. Regardless of how things ultimately shake out, however, change is> afoot. The most earth-shaking bit? Petroglyph’s no longer on development duty, with Trion Worlds now leading the charge on the lumbering, stumbling MMORTS.

In the future, nothing will cost anything. Ever. Well, except when it costs something. Which will be sometimes, but not always. Or ever, unless you want it to. Those are the sorts of wonderful logical fallacies somewhat – shall we say – misleading >phrases like “free-to-play” conjure up, but there’s no denying the business model’s effectiveness. Even so, there are plenty of kinks to work out, which is why life’s great big studio audience emitted a collective gasp when Crytek CEO Cevat Yerli announced that his company was closing up the non-F2P part of its shop as soon as possible. During a recent interview with RPS, however, he clarified that stance and noted, among other things, that it’s “too early to say” whether or not Crysis 4 will be F2P.

According to the surprisingly sobering (and unsurprisingly incessant) Christmas jingles currently spewing out of every speaker-endowed device on Earth, the weather outside is frightful. And while a veritable barrage of slight breezes has indeed caused me tremendous hardship during my trips between warm places to buy $6 cups of coffee, I think perspective’s important. For instance, soldiers on World War II’s Eastern Front braved inclement weather that was nearly> comparable to my own. Forecasters, I imagine, declared it snowy with a chance of bullet blizzards and mortar hail. Then they got run over by tanks. Company of Heroes 2, meanwhile, is aiming to recreate that particular horror of war, and it’s looking like a pretty miserable time (at least, for your tiny popsicle army men) indeed. I bet their coffee was cheaper, though.

Forge is proof that not earning your Kickstarter funding isn’t the end of the line. The third-person multiplayer action game fell some way short of a $300,000 cash grab, but regrouping on Steam Greenlight gave it a boost and it managed to launch this week. Here’s what a few hours on the servers has taught me. (more…)

It’s too late in the day for anything but an explanatory headline. I was going to go with ‘Steam Punk’ because ‘indie development = punk’ but then I realised that was utter nonsense so I decided not to. Here is the news, straight from the IGF organisers: “All IGF Main Competition finalists for this year’s event will receive the opportunity to accept a distribution agreement for Steam.” The IGF hasn’t made distribution agreements on behalf of developers though, with the final decision as to how the finalists reach the public still in the hands of the entrants. Instead, this route appears to be a means of avoiding arcane normal submission procedures or Greenlight.